Just a Nurse
by Ginger Strivelli
Pearl was standing outside the field hospital in Verdun, France. She was a witch, but that wasn’t even her real secret. She was pretending to be a nurse, trying to help save as many wounded soldiers and civilians in the months-long Battle of Verdun in the Great War. She had some basic nursing skills, but she had some impressive magical skills. Even more impressive was the secret tool she was using to help her save more people than her nursing or witching could save alone.
There had been a lull in the fighting. It wasn’t a ceasefire; the battle never really stopped, but the wounded had all been tended to at the moment, and no new ones were being dropped off yet. So Pearl went to her tiny room in the basement of the hospital to sleep. She knew she didn’t really have enough time to rest, but she could use magic for that, too. Not her magic; she’d have to enlist the magic of the mirror.
“Magic mirror on the wall, awaken and hear my call.”
“You don’t have to use silly poetic words, you simpleton.” Posterior Dimitri, the crude personality of the three pieces of the broken magical mirror addressed her out of his broken shard in the ancient, ornate gold frame.
“Posterior Dimitri, I am too tired and too crestfallen to deal with you right now. I want to speak to Superior or Anterior Dimitri.”
“You called, my dear?” Anterior was called such because the Witches and Wizards who owned the magic mirror usually called upon him first for his pleasant demeanor. He spoke smiling from his third of the mirror while his disagreeable brother faded away in his corner.
“I need to sleep a night’s worth — or two night’s worth — in the hour or two before more wounded arrive,” Pearl said, dropping to her cot and closing her eyes.
“Perhaps Superior would have a better spell for that; sleep is tricky, and we call him Superior because he is superior at magic,” Anterior said and departed from the mirror shard he was trapped in.
“Yes, yes, I can do that, of course,” said Superior, who appeared in the third and last broken piece of the mirror. “Repeat after me, child: I wish to sleep, oh so very deep, I need to rest, to be my very best, wake me in an hour, fully back in all my power.”
Pearl did as she was told. She had learned not to question the magic mirror’s spells, be they complex or simple, be they strange or mundane, be they words or deeds. She was sound asleep a single inhaled breath after repeating the incantation.
Alas, she didn’t even get the whole enchanted hour of sleep as fifty minutes later the sirens of approaching ambulances woke her. Still, those fifty minutes of sleep felt like hours and hours, and she jumped up and ran out energetically.
She was gone only a few moments. She suddenly rushed back in the door and ran to the broken magic mirror on her wall. She didn’t have any poetic words this time; she just said, “Help!”
“My lovely Pearl, what do you need?” Anterior appeared.
“This child,” she unwrapped her shawl to show a blood-covered baby aged just a few months. “Help her. She was wounded by an errant bullet. The doctor told me to leave her be, there was no hope. I just can’t though; surely you can help me save her?”
“Hold her closer, let me see.” Superior Dimitri appeared in his shard, making his brother fade away from his.
Pearl did as she was told. Superior Dimitri looked over the child with both his eyes and his third eye. “The Doctor is right, there is nothing medically you can do for her. Magically, however, we may be able to save her life, though she’ll be disabled nonetheless. Her spine is too damaged to repair even with magic.”
“I am quite sure her mother would prefer a disabled child to a dead one,” Pearl said. “You are my magic mirror, help me save her.”
Behind Pearl came a voice of agreement. “I most certainly do!”
Pearl whirled around to see the child’s mother, though wounded in a leg, had managed to follow Pearl to the basement room.
“Oh, no, ma’am, you mustn’t be here, you can’t see—”
“That you are talking to some demon in a magic mirror. I’ve seen it, and I do not care as long as you can save my Marie. Do so by whatever black magic you have access to.”
Pearl turned back to the mirror. She begged again for help. All three Dimitris conversed with each other and her about how to proceed.
The child’s mother couldn’t hear the voices in the mirror, only Pearl’s. She couldn’t see the faces in the broken mirror either. She was worried that the nurse was not just a witch but insane. But she didn’t care as long as little Marie lived.
Pearl laid the baby on her own cot face down and, as the Dimitris had directed her, she used her magic wand to create a strong electromagnetic field form over the baby’s back. She slowly twisted her wand counter-clockwise.
“Your field isn’t magnetic enough. Turn up the frequency!” Superior Dimitiri shouted.
“I’m trying. I can’t gather enough power from myself,” she shouted back.
Marie’s mother only heard her reply but gathered the gist of the problem. “Can you use mine? Use my power. Take it!” She held her right hand out to Pearl.
“Are you left-handed?” Pearl asked.
“What?”
“I need your outward-energy hand. If you’re left-handed, then it is your right hand.”
“No, here take my left hand, then.” She had decided in her panic to trust that the nurse was not crazy.
Pearl took the mother’s left hand and tried again to form the electromagnetic field with her wand. Still it was failing to draw the bullet out of the child’s back.
“Your wand is wood; it conducts, but metal would conduct better.” Superior Dimitri shouted. “You must hurry, she is dying.”
Pearl jumped up, dropping her wooden wand and the mother’s left hand. She rooted through a drawer till she found a silver-plated nail file. She returned to the cot and grabbed the woman’s left hand again. She held the nail file over the child’s gushing back wound. She grimaced, closing her eyes trying to squeeze all her energy into the makeshift wand.
Marie’s mother followed suit. Although she knew not how to direct energy, she was able to gather her own up fairly well with the extra adrenaline flowing. Pearl was able to absorb it from her and add it to her own energy.
Finally, a bent bullet came unscrewing from the baby’s back. More blood came flowing freely behind it.
“Shut up, Posterior, I know I have to stop the bleeding now. I don’t need your help for that.” Pearl had dropped the nail file and Marie’s mother’s hand. She frantically searched through her nurse’s bag by the cot. She was pulling out bandages, needles, and thread. “Yes, Posterior, I know; I must clean it, too.”
Marie’s mother handed Pearl a bottle of wine from the table. “Your demon said to clean the wound? Will this work?”
“Yes!” Pearl took the wine bottle and set to work cleansing and sewing up the shattered vein and then the skin of the baby’s wound. There was nothing she could do to fix the spine, but the child would live without the use of her legs.
Pearl was chanting a healing spell as she did the final stitches. Marie was praying to Mother Mary. They both fell silent when Pearl flipped the baby over and tried to get a response from her.
The baby blinked. Pearl and her mother burst into tears. The baby cried weakly, too, for a moment before settling when her mother picked her up. The baby’s legs hung limp, but her arms were clutching at her mother’s hair.
“You saved her!” the woman exclaimed. “You and your demons saved her. You hear them from that mirror, don’t you?”
“You can’t tell anyone... you can’t take the baby up there. The doctors will know we couldn’t have saved her without...” Pearl looked for the word.
“Without some unnatural or supernatural help?” the mother said, kissing her baby’s face. “I don’t care if it was the devil himself that talks to you from that thing.”
“They will care: the doctors, the priests, maybe; but not the generals, since I keep saving their wounded men, but... the others, they will care.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” She kissed Pearl on both cheeks and headed back out the door with her baby clutched to her chest.
“I need to fix your leg wound!” Pearl called.
The woman had totally forgotten she had been shot, too. She came back in and sat down, looking worriedly toward the mirror.
“It’s a minor flesh wound; I don’t need their help,” Pearl said reassuringly.
The woman nodded and bit her finger as Pearl sewed up her leg. Afterward she kissed Pearl’s cheeks again and rushed out into the night.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” Pearl called after her.
“You saved my daughter when no one else could. I’ll take your secret with me to my grave.”
Copyright © 2025 by Ginger Strivelli
